Category Archives: Government

Quote of the Day – Robb Allen(10/8/2012)

  By Barron | October 8, 2012 - 09:49 | , ,
2 Comments

My girls weren’t as into Sesame Street as I was as a kid, but they did enjoy it and I would gladly fork over a few bucks to keep them on the air if it was required. However, I’ll do it voluntarily. Put the tax man’s gun to my head and demand it and suddenly I’ve got no desire for the show to go on.

Robb Allen – Let them eat seed
October 8, 2012

[Honestly, go read the whole thing.  It's amazing the number of people who don't seem to understand that small numbers do accumulate to a big one.

Sesame Street gets a large amount of support from the public without forcible conscription from the government.  So pardon me if I don't start crying at the idea of trying to lessen our burden of debt.

Folks, you need to realize something and the sooner the better. We're broke.  We're spending more than we're bringing in and the debt isn't just our's, it's our children's.  Tell me, how would you like it if instead of getting an inheritance or rather nothing at all, your parents left you 15 years of mortgage payments for a house that was underwater?  Borrowing against your kids future isn't fair, it isn't ethical, it's merely robbing your kids.  You're signing checks in your kids name, not your own.

I'm became down right angry about when I became old enough to understand the national debt and discovered my share of it.  I hadn't even started a job yet and there was debt in my name that I honestly never wanted to be a part of.

And for what?  So women like this can have a phone?  So that we can fund shows that could survive on their own through public funding?  So that I can pay for someone to survive that is too lazy to work?  So that ultimately I suffer an extra burden of supporting others and their personal morals so they can feel better about themselves?

Ever last little pet project needs to start being deleted.  You don't need to just go and attack things that are a large single chunk, you need to cut all the small stuff that adds up.  A million here and a million there, eventually you're talking very serious money.  It adds up to the tune now of over 16 trillion dollars, which makes the debt for every man woman and child $51,370.

Now the thing is, not everyone pays taxes.  If you're a taxpayer, your debt burden is $141,142 dollars.  That's right, our government has spent so much that you could buy a house for what you now owe from them writing checks in your name.

News flash for everyone, yes it's going to hurt, yes it's going to suck.  There maybe some things that don't survive.  But the fact is, total economic collapse is going to be even more painful.  Eventually your bill has to come due, the question is, why is it so many keep on insisting on making it bigger.  Don't answer that, I already know. -B]

Quote of the Day – Bitter(10/7/2012)

  By Barron | October 7, 2012 - 08:00 | , ,
5 Comments

Why is PBS lobbying so hard for taxpayer funds? I know they raise money effectively. I gave during a fundraiser to get @alfieboe tickets.

Bitter – Tweet
October 5, 2012

[The answer to this is actually really simple.  PBS while they could fund themselves through private means still wants "free" money from the government.  It makes things that much more cushy.

Government throwing funds at the economy to "stimulate" it, actually has the opposite effect and I will explain what I watched first hand.

Back when they did they started talking about the massive bailout almost immediately utilities put a halt to current projects.  Utilities plan projects years in advance and have the funds to do them.  They froze the projects because they could smell money on the table and ultimately they could use it to improve their bottom line.  When the stimulus was finally passed they then needed to file for the grants.  The way this worked most simply was a dollar for dollar matching scheme to help with equipment retrofits.

So all of that moved at a snails pace through the cogs of government bureaucratic paper. Meanwhile here in reality, planned projects have now been on hold for over 6 months, all because they could smell money on the table.  When funding finally did start rolling in, almost a year after it started to slow down, projects rates looked just like it did prior to the funding push.  What happened was a projects that it merely subsiding what was already planned.  This didn't have the effect of creating jobs since it's still the same crews doing the work.  The most entertaining thing though is overall the decrease in output will never be really made up.  Everything the utilities are doing was already planned, this didn't magically create extra work.  All it did in the end was delay the inevitable.

How's that for the government "stimulating" the economy?  Still think only the government is capable of solving problems?

This is why PBS is going off the deep end.  They see free money and they want some of it.  -B]

Been There, Done That

  By Barron | October 6, 2012 - 18:46 | , , ,
4 Comments

I recognize this silence and mood, both from growing up and the recent unemployment in this house.

Found via Kevin

Fearless leader came out yesterday and said that unemployment drastically dropped.  Except that also included some new ways of calculating the numbers.  Except every way I’ve heard of them calculating the numbers is cooking the books.  My wife was "unemployed” for a year and a half, though she didn’t qualify to be counted amongst the unemployed even while trying to find a job.  It’s all done to provide political leverage.  But if we use the same method they’ve been using it provides us a decent window to see what the trend is like.

Shamelessly stolen from Joe, who took it from Tyler Durden,  tell me, can you spot the statistical outlier?

SeptemberChangeNSA20-24_2

Or how about seasonally adjusted:

SeptHistorical20-24_2

If you can’t make sense of the Seasonally Adjusted chart, let me give you a clue.  Which one of these has a swing month to month well beyond any other?  Can you spot it?  I knew you could!  The fact is, employment sucks and here’s a big clue for everyone, government cannot make it better.  Despite the smoke politicians blow up your ass about creating jobs, they can’t create jobs.  There are only two things that government regulations can do, make it more difficult to hire someone or remove money from the pocket of someone who would give you a job.  If anything when they throw money at something it actually tends to have the opposite effect since people want the free money.  More on that bit later.

Everyone keeps looking at the state as being the solution to their problem.  They keep asking what can my government do for me!?  Well if government had its way, it would make you their slave by making you dependent upon them.  From the looks of this lady, they’re succeeding. 

Quote of the Day – Spencer Ackerman(10/4/2012)

  By Barron | October 4, 2012 - 17:30 | , , ,
2 Comments

The Department of Homeland Security compiled and disseminated the following information as part of a post-9/11 partnership with state and local law enforcement to prevent terrorism: DHS doesn’t appear to care how it spends its cash. The Senate inquiry determined that DHS was “unable to produce a complete and accurate tally of the expense of its support for fusion centers.” Its estimates range between $289 million and $1.4 billion. In other words, DHS doesn’t even know how much money it’s spent on what it calls a centerpiece of its counterterrorism strategy.

Spencer Ackerman - DHS Counterterror Centers Produce ‘a Bunch of Crap,’ Senate Finds
October 2, 2012

[Well, when you know and realize that the TSA, and by proxy it's parent the DHS is a complete and utter security theater the above is kind of obvious.

Besides it's not their money they're spending, it's our money, well at least the money earned by 53% of us. Why should they worry about how much they spend.  They can just tax us for more right? -B]

SSCC #420 – New Orleans

  By Barron | October 4, 2012 - 10:30 | , , ,
1 Comment

Seriously I didn’t not plan for this in advance, the number and crime are purely coincidental.

Assistant city attorney Jason Cantrell was issued a summons after he dropped a joint while talking to a police officer in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

Cantrell, 43, was cited for simple drug possession and released under a city policy for low-level marijuana cases, according to police.  

Now while apparently the law was followed in this case, there is a reason I’m placing this under the criminal count.

Cantrell has practiced civil and criminal law in New Orleans for 17 years, including six as a public defender in Juvenile Court. In an ironic twist, the 43-year-old also worked as a drug court attorney.

(Emphasis mine.)  While it does seem that most of the work may have been on the defense side instead of the prosecution, he still was a city employee.  Charged with enforcing and upholding the law.

Now he has promptly resigned and the punishment matches what the rest of the public should see in that municipality if the article is to be believed.  Still, this fits perfectly with the, “Laws for thee, not for me” tag.

State Sponsored Criminal #420: Jason Cantrell

Because laws only apply to the lowly peons.  Those who work for the king are allowed to have any noun they want.

h/t Dave Hardy.

Ear Worm Wednesday – 10/3/2012

  By Barron | October 3, 2012 - 12:45 | , , ,
3 Comments

Trapt-Stand Up

When a bunch of us finally stand up, it’s going to be ugly, nasty, and at a minimum it will look like Atlas shrugging.  I’m tired of supporting people like this (just watch the video below, it’s got a response tied to it I fully agree with).

So if the government will buy me a phone, why am I working to pay for my own phone and service? Seriously where do we draw the line?  I am staring at the fact that my tax burden is about to increase by enough that I’ll be making the same I did last year after Uncle Sam is done with me.

You read that right, I get promoted and a raise and my Uncle Sam comes along and say’s, “You don’t need that, this woman over here needs an ‘Obama Phone’.”  All I have to say is vote out the incumbents; every last one of the corrupt little turds, even if you don’t think they’re a problem.

Pardon me while I go off and do something else before this becomes a full-fledged rant.

Thank You Captain Obvious…

  By Barron | October 1, 2012 - 17:57 | , ,
5 Comments

DSC_7521_tonemappedSo I stumbled across the following today which while isn’t news to me may be news to others, and even more so may be discounted or considered untrue.  I initially wanted to cover this as I went through the my “Power Series” posts and I touched on it on an episode of Vicious Circle but I think it’s time for me to write it all out.

President Obama has made so-called “green energy” policies a key part of his economic agenda, but as a new book argues, they actually disproportionately hurt the poor by boosting the cost of energy.

This is considered just common knowledge to those within the utility industry.  The reason being is because our legislators are ignoring not just the laws of economics but also the laws of physics.

For the purpose of this example I am going to talk specifically about the Pacific North West, more specifically Washington.

In the mid-2000′s Governor Gregiore decided that hydro-electric dams are not a renewable resource and that by 2020, 20% of the state’s electricity will be “renewable”, read that as wind power.  As an FYI for those out of the area, we pay approximately 4-5 cents per KWh for hydro up here.  Hydro is cheap and plentiful here in the Pacific North West, so much so we ship a good chunk of it to California.

To further encourage the construction of wind farms beyond the mandate the operating costs are subsidized by the state.  The cost even subsidized for a wind farm in the area is approximately 15-17 cents per KWh.  Yes you read that right, 3 times as much even with the state subsidizing it’s operation.

Except wind is not as “Green” as everyone makes it out to be.  You see wind can quickly come and go.  This means generation can quickly come and go offline merely based on what the weather does.  This is a problem because power is consumed on an on-demand basis.  You don’t want your lights turning on in the middle of the night right?  Just the same you don’t like the power going out while you’re working on your computer writing up that report for work.  Part of the whole “smart house” push is so that the utilities can control the load as well such as your refrigerator, dryer, etc., to shed load when necessary.

It makes sense and it sounds good, but ultimately I’m paying for a service and you can either provide it or you cannot.  Well the biggest problem with wind is how quickly it can disappear.  Generators don’t start instantly and other generation in the system doesn’t instantly spin up to supply power to the load.  There is inertia involved and to increase the power means you need to increase the torque etc.  The sudden decline in power being supplied while the load remains constant can cause system instability.

The solution to this problem is to have an onsite generator(s) at a wind farm that idles while the wind farm is producing power.  Usually this takes the form of a Natural Gas Turbine generator.  As the wind dies off the generator spools up to take the load.  Then the generator slowly spools back down to let the rest of the grid slowly absorb the power load.  So in other words your wind generator is burning fuel in a turbine, running as inefficiently as possible so it can pick up the load in event of a rapid loss of wind.

Out here in the Pacific North West this becomes very apparent in the spring with the high spring run off as well as peak winds through the area.  This past year the utilities were forced by the state to buy power from the wind farms while shutting down the dams.

Yes you read that right, the utilities were forced to buy more expensive power and leave cheaper power idle.  Not only were the dams forced to be idle, but because it occurred during peak run off, they were forced to dump water over the spillway and waste it.  Instead of following the laws of economics, they were tossed to the side and instead of the wind, the more expensive power providing the back fill for what hydro couldn’t provide, the roles were reversed, and for what?

Ultimately this does nothing but increase the rates for energy consumption.  Doubly so since the dam has increased costs because instead of it producing power, it’s forced to be shutdown, despite it being the more efficient and cheaper power producer.

This is what happens when politicians get involved in economics and start regulating business.  Instead of the consumer getting a better deal, they get a more expensive product and overall crappier service due to the power swings that come with the fluctuations in wind.

Then again, the goals of our politicians could be much more sinister.

What is wrong with this picture…

  By Barron | September 29, 2012 - 15:04 | , , , , ,
Comments Off

First up is the following headline:

US Embassy issues terror warning for Americans in Egypt

It appears that there is credible information suggesting another terrorist attack is going to occur in the middle east. You know much like the first one that killed a US Ambassador and 3 other US citizens.  Our fearless leaders response can be summed up with the following statement:

The Obama administration notified Congress on Friday that it would provide Egypt’s new government an emergency cash infusion of $450 million, but the aid immediately encountered resistance from a prominent lawmaker wary of foreign aid and Egypt’s new course under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Umm, why are we still sending money to that crap hole?  Seriously, why is anyone in our government still contemplating sending our money to those who will just use it to kill our own civilians.

Yeah, Reason magazines response I think fits this incident quite well.

Lets not ignore the fact that this administration still tries to blame a video for something that is actually a terrorist action.  I watched the video and it doesn’t even qualify as something that would even fit into Grindhouse cinema.  Some of us have woke the fuck up, there’s plenty more than continue to want to rack up debt and fund our enemies, who’s really asleep at the wheel here?